Introduction

The “second slavery” in the Atlantic world refers to the renewed expansion and the creation of new frontiers of slavery, with modern capitalist characteristics, especially (but not exclusively) in the nineteenth-century slaveholding societies of the US South, Brazil, and the Spanish Caribbean (especially Cuba). It began during the Age of Revolutions and mirrored the piecemeal abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and of slavery itself in other parts of the Americas. The workforce of the second slavery primarily constituted—in the case of Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other Caribbean areas—smuggled slaves from Africa (illegally transported in an age wherein the transatlantic slave trade was abolished, a trade that is often referred to as having taken place in the hidden Atlantic). In the US, a massive internal slave trade from the “older” colonial slave societies of the Atlantic seaboard to the new cotton regions of the newly settled southern interior fueled the cotton revolution and the second slavery there. In Brazil, too, a thriving internal slave trade supplemented the mass importation of enslaved Africans in the nineteenth century. In some regions, especially in the Caribbean, African slave labor was supplemented by so-called coolie migrations of bonded migrant workers from especially southern China, India, and the Pacific regions starting in the 1840s.

This chapter examines the era of “second slavery” from roughly 1800 to 1888. It starts with the development of the second slavery in the wake of the Atlantic revolutions, which included the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade starting with the US and Great Britain in 1808. It then discusses the intensification and modernization of plantation agriculture in the main regions of the second slavery, supplemented by the rise of slave trading in the hidden Atlantic (the Atlantic after the formal abolition of the Atlantic slave trade) as well as internally within slaveholding societies (especially in the US South and Brazil).

The Second Slavery

Individual elements of the second slavery had already emerged before the Age of Revolutions, especially with regard to technological innovations and the capitalist expansion of slave-produced agricultural commodities in the Americas for Atlantic markets (especially sugar but also tobacco, indigo, rice, and by the end of the eighteenth century even cotton). The development of Atlantic slavery gave rise to the modern slave plantation system, whose primary aim was the accumulation of capital from slave-produced commodities and from the racial commodification of enslaved bodies themselves. The sugar revolution in particular was characterized by colonial technological breakthroughs in industrialization and modernization, that allowed the sugar regions to expand and intensify their slave plantation systems into extremely profitable and advanced enterprises.

Before the revolution, Saint-Domingue was the most productive colony in the world. Its wealth was based on almost entirely on the extreme exploitation of masses of slaves on its vast sugar plantations (flanked by coffee, indigo, and some cotton and cocoa plantations). The beginning of the revolution there, which broke out in August 1791, however, toppled its place at the top of the slaveholding regions of the Americas. Only a week after the revolution broke out, about 140 plantations were no longer under the rule of their administrators and overseers. The revolution spread, and the many rebellions and uprisings across the colony were ultimately beyond control. Led by priests of slave religions and commandeurs, the insurgents formed war gangs and small armies. The Haitian Revolution was a complicated and bloody affair. The long-term consequences included the abolition of slavery and the destruction of the hitherto dynamic plantation region of the Americas.

The revolution on Saint-Domingue and its virtual destruction as a primary plantation-based producer of agricultural commodities in the Atlantic world coincided with—and to a certain extent helped usher in—a new phase of slavery, one characterized by the opening up and intensification of new frontier regions for capitalist plantation agriculture. This new phase included the decline of some of the “older” plantation zones of the Americas, where slave-based agriculture had reached its limits—from the sugar plantations of Saint-Domingue to the cocoa plantations in Venezuela and the tobacco plantations of Virginia—but also the renewal and expansion of capitalist plantation agriculture in new breakthrough-regions, especially the Spanish Caribbean (Cuba and Puerto Rico), Brazil, and the southern US. Spaniards in Cuba and Cuban Creoles (who also called themselves or had themselves called “Spaniards”) as well as naturalized elites on the island, for example, successfully transformed previously forested regions into a new plantation economy that revolved mainly around sugar (taking over from Saint-Domingue) but also coffee and tobacco. Cuba also developed with modern cities, port economies, and warehouses, connecting with the broader Atlantic and global economy. This, in turn, revolutionized mobility and communications—especially railroads, shipping and steamer lines, and newspapers—even in the plantation towns of the flat hinterlands—and led to the development of sugar refineries and other technological innovations. The American Revolution also helped kickstart the second slavery in mainland North America, as it ended with US acquisition of vast new territories in the southern interior of mainland North America that proved especially fertile for cotton production (and, in southern Louisiana, sugar production), stimulating a massive expansion of slave-based agriculture in that region. This expansion, too, helped revolutionize transportation and communications, and led to the development and expansion of several new port cities, including New Orleans. In Brazil, the transition was fueled by the opening up of new regions for coffee production and other agricultural commodities. In the south of Brazil, especially in the Vale do Paraíba and in the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo, coffee was produced for world markets. Brazil initially industrialized less quickly, especially in transport; massive industrialization only started around 1860. In all of these regions, however, global market developments created new opportunities for the expansion and reinvigoration of slave-based plantation agriculture, even as slave-based plantation agriculture declined in the older plantation societies of the Americas.1

The concept of “second slavery” was introduced by Dale Tomich, a historical sociologist, in the 1980s. Tomich initially developed it to conceptualize economic developments on Martinique and to understand the place of the French Caribbean within the international division of labor in the context of Immanuel Wallerstein’s analysis of world capitalism. The concept has since been applied to essentially refer to the modernity of slavery in the southern US, southern Brazil, and the Spanish Caribbean colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico. It was not limited to these places, however. Second slavery in the nineteenth century also played a role in Martinique and Guadeloupe as well as Suriname, British Guiana, and Trinidad/Tobago, and elsewhere in the Atlantic world and far beyond.

Since its initial conceptualization by Tomich, understandings of the “second slavery” have been expanded by two conceptual dimensions. One is “war capitalism,” propounded especially by Sven Beckert, which is defined as the violent exploitation of the non-West through war, piracy, enslavement, theft of natural resources, and the physical seizure of markets.2 War capitalism defined the second slavery in the nineteenth-century American South, for example, as slaveholders and planters from the “older” slave regions along the Atlantic seaboard pushed into the interior in order to develop cotton, waging war and dispossessing Native American communities in the process. Similar cases of war capitalism also characterized the expansion of slavery into frontier regions in Cuba and, around 1860, in Brazil.

A second conceptual dimension of the second slavery is the reinvigoration and expansion of forced labor migration in an age in which the Atlantic slave trade was legally abolished and its abolition was enforced, mainly by the British, and in which some regions began to abolish slavery altogether. This dimension can be further subdivided into two branches. First, the hidden Atlantic, which refers to illegal slave smuggling from Africa (not only West Africa but even East Africa and Madagascar), despite legal bans. (As stated above, the southern US, Cuba, and Brazil also developed massive internal slave trades in order to meet the insatiable labor demands of the new frontier plantation regions—in the southern US this trade forcibly relocated roughly one million African-American slaves across state lines, mainly to the cotton regions of the Deep South.)3 And second, the global forced migration of people from South, East, and Southeast Asia to the circum-Caribbean, mainly to supplement black labor in colonies that abolished slavery but attempted to reinvigorate their plantation economies with different forms of bonded labor rather than slave labor. In particular in the British Caribbean (especially Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad), plantation agriculture survived abolition to some extent by the implementation of a quasi-second slavery “without formal slavery,” which included arrangements by which so-called bonded “coolie labor” was brought in from Asia. Similar experiments occurred in the Dutch colonies, Cuba, and elsewhere.

Plantations, Industrialization, Technology, and Second Slavery

One of the main characteristics of the second slavery was the application of modernized industrial technologies and machines on plantations—especially those dedicated to the production of sugar, cotton, and coffee, as well as, in different ways, tobacco—and in the transportation and sale of these commodities in world markets. Technological development and industrialization in on-site plantation production affected storage and transport on the plantations and along commodity chains, especially in port complexes, massive storage facilities (with its own warehouse revolution), and new methods of transport, also far from plantations. Steamers, railways, and large port warehouses, as well as newspapers and other modern forms of communication, were present in almost every plantation hub.

In the following I present the processing of the plantation commodities of sugar, tobacco, coffee, and cotton, and I evaluate their importance for technological development, industrialization, and social formation in the large territories of the second slavery.

Sugar

As David Pretel recently argued: “Among the technological histories of tropical commodities, sugarcane stands out as the most salient.”4 Sugarcane, along with the tobacco already grown by Native Americans, was the first slave-based cash crop to be produced on a large scale in the Americas. Successful cultivation of sugarcane depended on the cane type, soil, climate, and the rhythm of growth and planting. Its processing and preparation for market was an industrial process. Because the sugar juice spoiled quickly in the harvested cane, and it literally necessitated a rapid and industrial processing, with various machines and specific technologies. After being harvested by enslaved people in the gang system, the sugarcane had to be transported to a central mill as quickly as possible for processing. The sugar mills themselves, especially the cylinders between which the juice was pressed from the cane, were improved in the era of the second slavery, using iron instead of wood, and horizontal instead of vertical presses. From around 1840, the horizontal mills also made it possible to use a wide conveyor belt made of metal rods between two parallel chains for the sugar cane cut into pieces.

The most dangerous injuries occurred during this stage, as overworked and exhausted slaves often got caught between the rotating parts of the sugarcane presses when they were feeding the stalks into it by hand. In addition to the mill house, the boiling house, the separation and refining house (for separating molasses and sugar and for production) belonged to the central part of a sugar plantation. Also often present were a drying house; a building for the production of rum (with distillation equipment); a warehouse for bagasse and fuel; and various workhouses for blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and other related handicrafts. The processing centers of the plantations often resembled factories, and the processing itself very much resembled an industrial endeavor, with modern technologies and apparatuses grinding and squeezing the sugarcane juice; transferring it to the boilers; cooking, skimming off impurities, and crystallizing the sugar crystals; refining; centrifuging (to separate liquid components) and drying (in different collection forms or clay vessels); whitening the best crystals; as well as storing the finished products for transport. From around 1840, the steam engine had established itself as the drive system on the most modern plantations.

Sugar plantation economies adopted new technologies in virtually all related activities. Enslaved people worked according to strict time management, often with bells and clock towers by the mid-nineteenth century. Modern transportation, which included railways and steamer ships, transported plantation commodities to port cities and beyond to global markets. Communications regarding everything from logistics to price fluctuations were vastly improved through the establishment of newspapers in every hub, assisted by telegraphs for rapid information exchange. The organizational facilities in transport hubs, including storage facilities but also banking and credit systems, became highly organized and modernized in the era of the second slavery. Even “small modernization”—the production of all manner of related equipment (from carts to machetes to crates)—improved in efficiency. Sugar was clearly the engine of the industrial revolution in the tropical and subtropical Americas. As historian Robert Gudmestad has argued, “it was in sugar production, though, that technology had the biggest impact.”5

Tobacco

Tobacco, together with sugar, was the early trigger of the colonial export economy, technology, and capitalist development. To this day, tobacco cultivation takes place with little technology and machines, but an exhausting—even extreme—labor process of hoing and digging, and highly developed knowledge and experience. This experience developed and was refined over time, so that by the era of the second slavery it had been perfected and streamlined to a great degree. The very earliest colonial tobacco-growing areas in the Atlantic world were in Barinas on the llano-frontier of today’s Venezuela. This tobacco was known as canasta/knaster because the tobacco leaves were wrapped into thick “ropes” and exported in rings in baskets (canastas). In Barbados, too, tobacco was the “first starter” of slave-based agricultural export production. And, of course, tobacco constituted a primary slave-based cash crop in Virginia and the Chesapeake region, as well as around Salvador da Bahia and western Cuba. European colonists in all of these regions turned to tobacco after acquiring indigenous knowledge about cultivation, care, and irrigation techniques (tobacco can only be grown near water). A successful harvest depended in no small part on experience and intimate knowledge of the plant. The tobacco was dried in special houses (usually constructed with material from palm trees) in complicated processes, fermented, and stored. Mills played a role in processing in the colonies themselves, especially during the heyday of snuff (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries).

The experience economy of colonial tobacco cultivation required highly specialized slaves. Tobacco plantations could hardly be mechanized. They were, however, dependent on transport infrastructures, harbors, and processing industries for the production of pipe tobacco, snuff tobacco, cigar tobacco, and cigarette tobacco. Despite being a relatively un-industrialized cash crop to cultivate on plantations, therefore—unlike sugar, for example—tobacco did stimulate modernization and technological innovation in its processing for sale on global markets, a process that was accelerated in the era of the second slavery.

Coffee

Nothing in modern history would have been possible without drugs. Without coffee (and tea), for example, there would have been no modern capitalism. Without coffee, tea, and other drugs and stimulants such as tobacco and cola (from kola nuts), which often also grow on plantations, there would have been no accelerated globalization of the “world economy” in the nineteenth century.

Coffee bushes thrive best at an altitude of 500–1500 meters above sea level in the tropics and subtropics, with plenty of heat during the day, but preferably in the shade. The coffee trees bear their first fruits after four to five years. On plantations during the era of the second slavery, slaves harvested the coffee berries by hand. The fresh coffee berries were laid onto large drying terraces of the plantations, paved with flat white stones. There they were washed and then dried at daily intervals for a period of time until the shells could be detached more easily. Drying took place only during the day. At night the coffee was piled up and covered against the night dew. That meant a lot of manual work by the slaves, but in the era of the second slavery this cash crop, too, stimulated and utilized new technologies—more in processing than in transportation. In coffee bean production mill technologies were of particular importance, especially for separating the dried shells from the raw beans. As mentioned above, there were also complicated washing and drying processes, water regimes with complex water tanks and canals, as well as mechanical cleaning, selection, and packaging processes. In the organization of transport, coffee planters could not compete in some areas with the wealthier sugar plantation owners. In some frontier coffee areas of the second slavery, such as the south of Brazil, transport modernization came only after the mid-nineteenth century, near the end of slavery.6

Cotton

Initially, the poorer relative of the above-mentioned luxury commodities was cotton. Yet cotton would come to surpass them all in the nineteenth century. Cotton significantly fueled the capitalist development and industrialization of Europe and the US, as well as the westward expansion and development of the US. Without cotton there would have been no modern textile and fashion industry, no underwear, and no global nineteenth century or romantic biedermaier. Before the second-slavery variety of efficiently processed short-staple cotton, cotton was a traditional resource commodity and a late starter of colonial and post-colonial industrialization. Cotton plantations in the US South had limited mill technology—for example, to power larger cotton-gins and to move the presses. Slave-based cotton production on southern plantations in the US was kickstarted in the 1790s with the invention of the cotton gin (which made harvesting the short-staple variety profitable), and was directly related to the processing industrialization of textile production in England and to global wartime capitalism (especially as it related to the violent westward expansion of the US South in the era before the Civil War). But it was a more “democratic” slave system than in the other second-slavery areas, in the sense that poorer white settlers were also able to purchase plantations and with limited capital outlay, as—again unlike sugar—cotton cultivation could be undertaken with minimal machinery. The simple cotton gin formed the mechanical basis for the cotton sector of the second slavery in the US South, although it certainly constituted one of the most important machines of the industrial age in general. In comparison to industrial sugar technology, it was a rather simple process. This relatively primitive cash crop, however, had massive consequences for territorial expansion and its success led to an explosion in the number of plantations in the US South in the era of the second slavery.

As cotton became more successful, however, plantations began to adopt ever more modern technologies to increase efficiency. The production of cotton as a raw material for factories in England—the main market for southern cotton—was an on-site process, and planters were keen to deliver high-quality finished products to English markets. This led to the development of cotton mills, for example, with the newest machines and installations. This changed the industrial architecture of the plantations, at least in the case of the most successful planters, and this in turn led to dramatic growth in plantation size and numbers of enslaved people. Such growth fueled the massive domestic slave trade that supplied the insatiable demand for slave labor in the cotton regions of the US South after the Atlantic slave trade had been banned (in 1808). Between the American Revolution and the US Civil War almost a million slaves from the eastern seaboard (mainly Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas) were transported via highly organized and efficient slave traders and slave markets to the most important plantation hubs of the Deep South, especially Natchez and New Orleans. The domestic slave trade constituted what Ira Berlin has dubbed a kind of “second middle passage.”7

Transportation modernization was also given a significant boost due to the success of cotton. From the 1830s, steam engine propulsion began to transform the logistics of plantation commodity export. The steamboat revolution on the rivers of the South, especially on the Mississippi, not only helped transport cotton to market but also slaves of the domestic slave trade to the cotton plantations of the South. “The steamboat and the slave plantation system mutually reinforced one another to develop cotton monoculture and transform he riverine ecology.”8 Modern ports, ships, and steamers also served the slave trade from outside the southern states, not only in the “hidden Atlantic” of smugglers, but also in the illegal smuggling trade from the Caribbean to the Gulf Coast ports of the cotton South.

Conclusion

The rise of the second slavery in the wake of the Atlantic revolutions—a reinvigoration and expansion of slave-based plantation agriculture in frontier regions of the Americas, even as the older colonial plantation regions experienced decline—was largely fueled by the development of major export commodities such as sugar (especially in Cuba but also in other regions such as southern Louisiana), cotton (in the US South), tobacco (in Cuba and the US), and coffee (first in Cuba, and after 1830 especially in Brazil). Each of these commodities was developed against the backdrop of increasingly advanced and modern processing technologies, methods of transportation (of both commodities and the human bodies that cultivated them), communications, and capital financing. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, slave-based plantation agriculture entered an age of modernity.

Sugar was by far the most technologically advanced and industrialized cash crop of the second slavery. From the complicated machinery, mills, and boilers employed on the plantations themselves to the highly organized transportation and logistics of sugar-based commodities to world markets, sugar became one of the most successful cash crops of the nineteenth century Atlantic world. It was also responsible for mass slave imports from Africa in the hidden Atlantic smuggling trade. The success of sugar led to the development of a highly modern capitalist society, especially in nineteenth-century Cuba.

The second slavery of cotton was undoubtedly not half as modern and industrialized as sugar in Cuba. But it was the “largest” second slavery (both in terms of spatial expansion and quantitaties production). Together with the influence that cotton had on the modernization of transportation (especially steamships) it was also the most influential and “most powerful” Atlantic society of the second slavery. As demonstrated in the work of Walter Johnson and Sven Beckert, the second slavery in the cotton regions of the US South were not as global as those of Cuba, but instead remained mainly focused on the British Empire (upon which cotton planters were indeed largely dependent). Culturally, socially and politically, this slavery was the basis of an (almost) independent post-colonial society. Capitalizing on human bodies—both as commodities and as a labor force—that were born and raised in the US and supplied via a massive domestic slave trade, this slavery was far less dependent on the hidden Atlantic smuggle of African slaves than Cuba or Brazil in the nineteenth century.

The second slavery of coffee in Brazil was, both spatially and quantitatively, the “second largest” in the era of the second slavery. The great slavery systems in historic Brazil mostly developed near the coast, but they did expand across large territories the provinces (now states) of the Brazilian Empire of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo. Sugar and coffee modernization were similar from 1760 to around 1830; they were based on mills and complicated management or organization of different work processes of slaves as well as individual professionals. However, the second slavery of coffee remained more traditional from 1820/30 for two related reasons. First, the owners and administrators of the “largest” coffee slavery of the world in southern Brazil and Rio had far more direct access to slaves from Africa, which they acquired through a regular and active trade across the Atlantic. From around 1850 an internal slave trade, similar to that in the US South, prevailed.

The second slavery of tobacco was not an industrial modern cash crop in the nineteenth-century sense, i.e., with machines. However, the tobacco economy did have tremendous influence and helped shape the history of regions such as Barinas (Venezuela), Virginia and the Chesapeake (US), and the frontier slaveries in the province of Pinar del Río in nineteenth-century Cuba. Of all the second-slavery plantation regions, those of tobacco attracted the fewest slaves from Africa—slaves in tobacco were mostly creole (American-born) slaves. In a way, tobacco was a relatively player in the development of the second slavery, but it did constitute a highly important luxury niche commodity in the Atlantic world and as such it contributed to regional developments in warehousing, shipping, and smuggling.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge Univesity Press, 2014); Dale W. Tomich and Michael Zeuske, eds., “The Second Slavery: Mass Slavery, World Economy, and Comparative Microhistories, Part I” [special issue], Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 31, no. 2 (2008); Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75, no. 3 (Aug. 2009): 627–50.

  2. 2.

    Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Penguin, 2014).

  3. 3.

    Michael Zeuske, “Out of the Americas: Slave traders and the Hidden Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century”, Atlantic Studies 15, no. 1 (2018): 103–35.

  4. 4.

    The Caribbean and the Atlantic World Economy. Circuits of Trade, Money and Knowledge, 1650–1914, eds. Adrian Leonard and David Pretel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

  5. 5.

    Robert Gudmestad, “Technology and the World the Slaves Made”, in: History Compass 4, no. 2 (2006): 373–383, 378; José Ortega, “Machines, Modernity, and Sugar: The Greater Caribbean in a Global Context, 1812–1850,” Journal of Global History 9, no. 1 (2014): 1–25; Daniel Rood, “Plantation Laboratories. Industrial Experiments in the Cuban Sugar Mill, 1830–860 “, in: New Frontiers of Slavery, ed. Dale Tomich (New York: SUNY Press, 2016), 157–84.

  6. 6.

    Tamira Combrink, “Slave-based coffee in the eighteenth century and the role of the Dutch in global commodity chains”, in: Slavery & Abolition Vol. 42:1 (2021), pp. 15–42; Rafael Marquese, “African Diaspora, Slavery, and the Paraiba Valley Coffee Plantation Landscape: Nineteenth Century Brazil,” Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center XXXI, no. 2 (2008): 195–216.

  7. 7.

    Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013); Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), ch. 4; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

  8. 8.

    Dale Tomich, et al., “The Lower Mississippi Valley Cotton Frontier,” in: Dale Tomich, et al., Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-century Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 19–38, 35.